


Concordance

by MyMisguidedFairytale



Series: light reading [3]
Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Anthropology, Cute, Developing Friendships, F/M, Graduate School, Languages and Linguistics, Linguistics, Poetry, Pre-Canon, Pre-Dark Continent Arc, Short & Sweet, Study Group, Teacher-Student Relationship, University
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-01-31 11:21:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18590230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyMisguidedFairytale/pseuds/MyMisguidedFairytale
Summary: He’s always thought that the beginning of any endeavor sets the tone for its success, and Professor Kururi has a good feeling about this year’s group of graduate students. / Kururi x Piyon





	1. Concordance

**Author's Note:**

> _Concordance_ was originally written and published on July 11, 2014 on [tumblr](https://cheadle-yorkshire.tumblr.com/post/91486917917/fanfiction-hunter-x-hunter-concordance).
> 
> Everything below is preserved as it was originally posted:
> 
> **Title** : Concordance  
>  **Pairing** : Kururi x Piyon  
>  **Word Count** : 1221  
>  **Summary** : He’s always thought that the beginning of any endeavor sets the tone for its success, and Professor Kururi has a good feeling about this year’s group of graduate students.  
>  **A/N** : Takes place ~4 years pre-canon. I first started shipping this as a half-joke, but then we learned that both Kururi and Piyon were linguists, and I thought it would be really cool if she was a graduate student of his at Barvard…and now the ship won’t get out of my head. So I went ahead and wrote it. Please enjoy!

_**Concordance** _

On the first day of his ancient linguistics class, Kururi makes sure to arrive at his classroom an hour and a half early, just in case. The door is locked.

But no worries! He gets a grumbling handyman to open the door for him, and proceeds to unpack his satchel and organize his papers and books in neat little rows on the desk. That task complete, he turns his attention to the rest of the classroom. There are only six students in his class this year—there are only fifteen entering this year in the entire interdisciplinary graduate program that combines classics, anthropology, and linguistics—and while that number is a little lower than in previous years, Kururi takes it as a good sign. This means he’ll be able to devote more attention to each individual student, and that’s a good thing, right?

So he arranges the desks in the front in two rows of three, pushing the older, smaller desks to the side. With a happy sigh, Kururi begins to cover the chalkboard in symbols and drawings.

Some indiscernable time later—the only clock is hidden behind a column, how utterly useless—he breaks his piece of chalk in a moment of too-excited scribbling. It clatters to the ground at the same time the door to the classroom opens, and as Kururi scrambles along the floor for the broken piece of chalk a young man stands awkwardly in the doorframe.

“…Is this Advanced Ancient Linguistics with Professor Kururi?”

“It is, it is! Come on in!” He tries to make his voice sound warm, and he pushes his glasses further up on his nose as the student enters, giving a discerning look at the desks before picking one in the back.

Kururi’s spirit sinks a little at that, but he sets the broken chalk back on the ledge and continues his writing with a new piece. The door squeaks again a few minutes later as more students enter, and Kururi calls back, “Someone tell me when it’s time, alright?”

Every so often, he glances back at the class to see the faces of who he will have the privilege of teaching that semester. There’s the sullen-looking boy in the back, a dark-haired girl off to the side, a boy wearing a pair of glasses similar to his—Kururi’s heart soars—and a girl sitting in the very front row of the desks he’d arranged, bless her, wearing a bright pink and yellow raincoat.

A few minutes later, a high-pitched female voice calls out, “Professor, it’s eight.”

It’s the girl in the loudly-colored raincoat. Kururi nods his thanks and finishes up his last few notations. Somewhere in the distance, a clock bell rings.

It’s his favorite timeslot, eight in the morning. There’s just something about the crisp air and the unique perspective the morning brings. He turns and smiles at his class. Only the girl in front returns it; the rest are looking through books or backpacks or have their faces attached to giant cups of coffee.

“Welcome, students! I am Professor Kururi, and this is Advanced Ancient Linguistics! I’m very glad to have all of you with me today!” He consults the first piece of paper in his carefully ordered stack and begins to take roll. That finished, he passes out the syllabi, proudly presenting a copy to each student in turn. He’s just passed out the last one—and really, this would be so much easier if they were all seated in neat rows, in the front—when the man in the back speaks up.

“Um, excuse me, sir, but is this in Nankul-ese?”

He brightens considerably on being called _sir_. It’s one of his favorite parts about being a professor—the respectful, deferential addresses. His students are always so kind.

“Yes, yes, of course! But which dialect?”

“…The Northern one…?” The same student answers, and Kururi beams at him in approval.

“Yes, of course! You can tell from the predominance of slashes and the complexity of the glyphs, in contrast to the version used by the Southern tribes. Who can tell me the main difference between the two?”

“The Southern one uses dots instead of dashes.” It’s the girl with the coffee, whose voice sounds flatter than a punctured tire.

“Correct!” His students are always so smart. “That will be your first assignment. Only the assignment descriptions and due dates for your papers and your language labs are in Nankul-ese; I didn’t want to make things too hard for you right away.” He looks around the room, expecting some sort of good-natured laughter, and is disappointed when it doesn’t come. “Please bring in your translations to the next class. I’ll warn you I’ve added a few elements that should be a challenge to translate—but linguistics is every bit as much about communicating the _intent_ and context behind words as it is parsing and diagramming the words themselves. For ancient languages, even more so.”

He begins his lecture, explaining the symbols on the chalkboard and giving a brief overview of the Nankul people and the formation of their language. He invites the students to translate his messages, and soon the chalkboard is completely full.

The girl in the strangely-patterned rainjacket had been nearly quiet all lecture, but she suddenly raises her hand in the air in the middle of his speech on Nankul phonetics.

“Ah—yes, Miss Piyon?”

“Class ended five minutes ago, Professor.”

He supposes that was the belltower he had heard not too long ago. “Then class dismissed. Remember your translations! _Nndano_! You can do it!”

He runs one hand through his hair, brushing it away from his face. He catches Piyon staring at him.

“You have chalk dust,” she says, and pokes a finger on a spot on her own face for reference, “here.”

“Ah.” He rubs at that spot, and Piyon’s mouth wavers in a poorly-suppressed smile. Is he just making it worse?

“…and here. And here.”

He stares at his fingers, the tips covered with white dust, in despair.

“Don’t worry about it,” Piyon adds, collecting her things. “Well, see you next class.”

She leaves with the rest, and when Kururi finishes packing up his own papers and turns towards the chalkboard, it almost seems a shame to have to erase it. But he must, for the next class to use it, so he puts his same methodical care towards ensuring it is clean and perfect and that all of the chalk is neatly arranged on the ledge.

What a good group of students. He’s always thought that the beginning of any endeavor sets the tone for its success, and from what he’s seen from them today, he has a good feeling about this semester.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. In linguistics, [concordance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_\(linguistics\)) happens when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates.
> 
> 2\. I drew on my own experiences from taking a collegiate foreign language linguistics class, but everything above with regards to linguistics was completely made up.
> 
> 3\. Here have another one of Kururi’s cute faces:  
> 
> 
> 4\. Thank you for reading! I would appreciate and value your comments. Who knows, there might be more of this someday. These characters are just too cute.


	2. Midnight Sun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THERE'S MORE!! It's only taken five years, but I got a sudden rush of inspiration for this story and decided to finish up the scribblings I'd written for this way back when. I hope you enjoy!

Piyon finds herself in the language lab, sitting before one of the banks of computers, headphones draped around her neck and a print-out of Padokian ballads resting in front of her.

The class had quickly departed from the Nankul-ese of their original lessons and they immersed themselves in working on translating examples of literature from the surrounding region, in what was today called Padokia. The area was famous for a specific type of poetry, and they had been tasked with translating the ancient verses into a modern version of the Padokian language—still in use today, by a subset of the population living along the rural parts of the most northern sections of the continent—and then recording the words so that Professor Kururi could more accurately ascertain their pronunciation and syntax. Piyon would be glad when they returned back to the ancient linguistics of the more oceanic Nankul people. 

The language lab is otherwise empty; her only company is a disinterested tech who signs her in and offers to show her how to use the software in a tone that suggests he hopes she declines. She's used similar programs in undergrad, with more modern languages—her count is impressive, but there are a few in her classes that eclipse her, to their constant reminders—and she picks a computer in the middle of the row and gets to work without a care for the stillness of the room or the thoughts of anyone who might overhear. 

She doesn't understand the ecology of the area well enough, which irritates her—she knows that in some arctic places the sun does not go down for days or even months at a time, and she does not have more than the shallowest understanding of the currents and volcanic or tectonic activity in the oceans surrounding the mainland that lend the island chains off to their right their significantly warmer climates. And she's seen pictures of auroras on her phone in low resolution, and endured whatever works of literary canon assigned to her throughout grade school, but reading poetry about the significance of such natural phenomenon does not inspire the deep wellspring of emotions in her chest that she believes it should. 

Her poetry was blocky and the rhymes, while consistent, lacked elegance. Still, it is the recording that is most important, and the accuracy of her pronunciation, so she pulls the headphones over her ears and adjusts the microphone in front of her mouth. 

She tests the connection, before popping a blank CD into the drive and starting to record.

_/I dream of sunrise in the black midwinter / when the ice thaws /_

_For months / And months / the sun revolves in one place / like a curved clay bowl upon a wheel /_

_I look down because / there is nothing to see on the horizon /_

_Beneath my feet is the reflection from the sky in the glare of the ice /_

_Sometimes shaking and writhing with ripples from something far-off and unreal and ignored /_

_That will choke the heavens with smoke overnight / That lingers like a stain /_

_Like a failure / Like a bad relative / Like a shiny scar on the twisting curve of a shoulder /_

_I cannot see the impossible end / Only bitter ash / For months / And months /_

_Loss is the sky without the sun/_

Each of her classmates had been given a different stanza of the poem to translate, and Piyon, arriving late to class the day the assignment went out, had been given the last section. It had been explained that some of the truly rarer and more inconsequential poetry from the area had never been translated into the modern Padokian, like this one—some minor poet of little reputation, nothing like the more popular ones of the same time from the insular farming regions that wrote tedious pastoral epics, for which Piyon was thankful were not on the syllabus—and their translations would all be combined together and added to an online database to share with the few others around the world who cared. It seemed like an odd way to go about doing it, but Piyon never questioned her assignments, or the people who gave them. 

She clicks around on the screen, ending the recording and settling her headphones around her neck. Earlier language lab sessions had seen them relaying mostly verb conjugations, and while Kururi would say that the intersection of arts and language is a striking one, worthy of great care and attention, Piyon finds herself yawning into the back of her hand.

Even on the days she does not have class, she cannot help but get up just as early. If nothing else, it seems to be having a positive effect on her productivity. 

She slides the CD out of the drive and seals it in its case, scribbling her name across the front in black marker. Thinking of the poetry, she adds a cartoonish sun and a few clouds in the top corner.

* * *

_/Loss is the sky without the sun/_

Kururi marks his grades with a green pen, not red—one of his colleagues at Barvard had done a study and found that using red makes someone more critical, and he wants to approach his students' work with fresh eyes and a clean perspective. This one has a few unexpected word choices, especially towards the end, and he marks the places where the translation was more forceful than necessary. As he adjusts the cord of his headphones around the tangled curls of his hair he notices that the counter on the last one has an extra thirty sections of space, even after the conclusion of the poem. 

It's mostly silence, with only a mechanical skipping noise to indicate that the recording is still ongoing. He thinks it might be a mistake, an error with the software—and they _had_ just upgraded the computers this semester, he's sure there might still be a few bugs to work out—when a soft, cheerful voice breaks through the quiet.

"Hi Professor! Hope you're having a great day!" Another pause. "That's all. See you later! Bye!"

It's in the modern Padokian dialect too, and with perfect pronunciation. He picks up his pen with a smile on his face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) In looking at the general Hunter World map, it's unlikely there would be a significant polar region since, you know, there's a gigantic ocean and lots of land beyond that, but I wanted to take some of the cooler aspects of our own world and apply it to the story here. I looked at areas like Svalbard and Kiruna; in Svalbard there is no sunset from 19 April to 23 August (wiki), and the North Pole has midnight sun for almost six months, from September to March. Polar Night is the opposite phenomenon, where the sun stays below the horizon during the day. I considered areas like the Galapagos; islands located at the equator would otherwise lead to a more tropical environment, but the currents bring cold water from southern Chile that has a really strong effect on the ecosystem. Padokia is on the very northernmost part of the map, and we see from Killua's home that it is mountainous and I imagine it's easy enough to infer that there could be a more arctic-inspired climate at the very top of the continent, and there _are_ a few islands on either side of the continent marked on the map. We don't know where the Nankul people Ging and Kururi talk about live, but I imagine it's somewhere along the top of the map, closest to where the Dark Continent would be.
> 
> 2) I'm really bad at poetry. I apologize for that, lol. But I did have a lot of fun imagining a _translated_ poem, and thinking in particular when choosing words why that word would have been picked over others, and how the meaning could change if you went with a softer or more aggressive word choice. I liked the idea of a person missing a sun _rise_ in a place where the sun is always up. And I always hated language labs, lol. But it was nothing like this, just verb conjugations for days. 
> 
> 3) Here, have another of Kururi's cute faces:  
> 
> 
> 4) Thank you for reading! I would appreciate and value your comments.


	3. Krakatoa

Three papers on the differences between the various settlements in the Northern Ceram basin and a presentation on both the history of some of the ancient peoples in the area and the various ways their language had changed over time—rapidly, with the invention of a new kind of sailing technique and a new form of ink made from a strange type of rock that washed up on the shore after a volcanic explosion in one of the neighboring island chains—Piyon feels both an increased grasp on the different ways an ancient history can teach the present population and a frustration that she cannot delve even deeper into the world that she studies so intensely day after day. 

Top marks on all assignments, and a cheerful note of encouragement written on the top of her midterm in glyphs and dashes next to a smiley face wearing lopsided glasses. She has had no trouble keeping her place at the top of the class, and has even to a degree found the work easy, all until this last, troublesome assignment cataloguing the exact meaning of a series of runes first found scrawled on the wall of a cave formation, and then copied onto planks they'd used as shields and artifacts like elaborate ritualistic bowls and carved into sections of bone. She glances at the books stacked high next to both elbows at her chair in the reading room in this section of the library. If there were people seated on either side of her, she would not have been able to see them, for how thick the reference books and geological compilations are pertaining to this small area of the world. Despite her best attempts, it has been impossible to arrange any kind of study group with her fellow classmates. There are so few of them, it seems it would be easy, but between their class schedules, work commitments, and general unwillingness to socialize, she finds herself alone yet again. 

Piyon purses her lips. Sorting through the books has been a struggle of several weeks; there is so little available on the few islands of their study to fill even a single book, so she must wade through the oceans of material that lump the entire archipelago into one overestimated, tumescent conglomerate. There will be a mention of the way one particular society used a certain kind of weapon to hunt in a separate book cataloguing ancient weapons, or one of their artifacts will show up in a separate catalogue of goods from a tribe on the far-off mainland, and Piyon will have to track its movement and try to place it in the context of their history from the designs on one blurry photograph. Nothing is digitized and there are no plans to do so, and her irritation doubles, then triples as she grinds her teeth. 

She stabs the page with her thumb. She hadn't even thought so highly of this one geographical area, or its people when she first started studying ancient linguistics. It is the inaccessibility of it now that drives her to learn even more. She even wants to go as far as to see it with her own eyes.

The writing on the pages blurs for a moment from lack of sleep, and she consults one of the books again. Professor Kururi himself has written several meandering articles about the subject, and his general conclusion had been that no one knows the exact meaning of the mysterious symbol, although he had been able to trace elements of its appearance to at least pin down a narrow range of creation. And each of his students had been given the same assignment, to offer their own interpretation on its meaning.

Piyon stares at one of the geological guides. The symbol was first drawn at the same time as the volcanic eruption, that had been corroborated by the ink. But what if the ink was not the method of its delivery but the very reason for its existence?

It had changed the very landscape of the region in all ways. By all accounts, clouds of ash had spread across the sea, drifting out beyond the great ocean and choking life in its immediate vicinity. Both people and animals had fled the area, and the Nankul people had welcomed most of them. It had led to a cultural and artistic renaissance of sorts. If it was not a proper name—and this was the hypothesis of one of her classmates, she remembers sullenly, the name of a king or prophet or great leader—Piyon finds herself suddenly believing the sign to be something less celebratory and something more sinister. 

The blurry picture isn't even centered properly, and she traces the approximate shape as best she can into her notebook. There are interlocking rings, and spikes shooting out like spokes on a wheel, and the ink is that same black as the sooty rock. 

She's seen something like it before, but it takes a moment to place it in her mind. It reminds her of a modern biohazard sign.

Perhaps something deadly had come out of the water when the volcano erupted—either from the volcano itself, or the ocean, washed ashore by the changing tides and the onrush of lava and noxious sediment. Perhaps the tribe had tried to warn others about it, or contain it in some way—either something biological, or physical, or—or—

She scratches at the sides of her head, burying her fingers in her hair. She doesn't know enough about fields of study outside this one to make more than the simplest of conjectures, but now at least a subject for her paper stands out like the scribbles from her pencil in the lined pages of her notebook. 

And that's what the symbol was. A warning. 

Piyon reaches into one of the oversized pockets of her jacket and draws out her phone, firing off a series of texts into the group chat for her class. _Group study? I'm at the library right now._

_Next time_ , texts Sasha, almost immediately, and Piyon is impressed by how quickly she responds for how much she hates the early mornings.

Five minutes later the quiet one, Bruce, responds with a single shrug emoji. He'd liked to joke that communicating with emojis over words was more similar to how things were done back in the times they were studying, and she'd liked to joke that this was why none of them really liked him very much.

_Next time! After class? I'll bring snacks?_ A few more messages follow, and Piyon's heart warms at how, for the first time, they're coming together as a group, like their own little community. 

A few days later she has three-quarters of a paper written and her mind is buzzing with even more possibilities. "Pass me the juice," she says, waving an arm towards one of their classmates rifling through a plastic bag. "No, the carbonated one."

"I think it's a pictogram," Sasha is saying, gesturing wildly with a lemon pastry. "If the volcano changed the nature of the landscape, it makes sense they'd try to record how it looked, especially if that area was venerated..."

" _Or_ it could be the name of some great king! A warrior or something!"

"What did Kururi say in his article? They only formatted the kind of glyphs found in the oldest caves like instructions, or lists. The ones found beside the symbol."

Piyon screws up her face to remember. "No, he said they were written in the same ink, so they were most likely written congruently. It was the ones on the other walls that were written _way_ earlier."

"I think he said both," Sasha says.

"Kururi says a lot of things."

"I think there's no wrong answer," one of the other girls, at the end of the table, pipes up. "Since you can't _really_ confirm what actually happened. It's really all about how we argue our points."

A pause. Piyon chews. "Can't argue with that."

They work in relative silence for the next few minutes, the conversation punctuated by anecdotes and meanderings.

"I'm just glad this course isn't as tough as Ancient Azian History, I almost had to re-take that one—"

"The internship at the museum in Swaldani I applied for loved that I've got experience with this sort of stuff. If I get the gig I'll be translating things for their exhibits—"

"I'll just be glad if I never have to see another pottery fragment again—"

"I want to see it," Piyon says, suddenly. The more she talks, the more the notion seizes her. "With my own eyes. This land, these sites."

The table falls quiet before one of the others stifles a laugh. "It's all the way on the other side of the world."

"So?"

"Have you ever even left the country before?"

Piyon chews on the inside of her cheeks, her face red. Her fingers itch, and she picks up her phone in one hand and her pencil in the other. All of that information, at the tips of her fingers, and it's still not enough. "Not yet. But I feel like there's something there I want to know."

"Good luck with that. The whole area is an international mess," Bruce says. "I'm not sure there's a way to do it legally. _Especially_ for a student."

Piyon falls silent, and a moment later the conversation resumes, about university sports and an upcoming holiday break. She still feels unsatisfied, but cannot place the source of her feelings. She presents her paper to the class to Professor Kururi's raving support, and makes plans to return the books she'd checked out and book travel for the fall holiday. She even orders a new jacket from an app on her phone, striped with cropped sleeves, for the newly-arriving colder weather. 

The thought that she could be on a beach, _using_ the languages she's studied, instead of sitting in the basement of a library reading textbooks aspiring to be as old as the subjects they're based on, is appealing beyond measure. She wants to ask Kururi if he's ever been, if he wants to go, if he's content with the theory or wants to put his knowledge into practice. 

She glances at the syllabus, tucked away inside a folder and marked with a bright purple pen where she'd translated the original Nankul-ese. Professor Kururi's office hours are translated beneath the assignment deadlines; she'd never once bothered to go visit him. With a wince, she's really not sure any of the others have, either.

He has one more appointment before the break. She doesn't think she'll have much to compete with for his time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) My original plan for this was to make it a series of small one-shots, each referencing a different aspect of Piyon's linguistics graduate school experience, from classroom to language labs, study groups, and office hours. There will be four chapters total, and I'm working on building a greater narrative and incorporating some minor mystery elements into the story as it progresses, especially relating to the Dark Continent. There's a lot we still don't know about it, so I'm having fun thinking about how Kururi in particular could have been drawn into Beyond's team and have a more personal stake in the expedition. 
> 
> 2) _Ceram_ is a reference to the Ceram Sea, one of several small seas between the scattered islands of Indonesia (wiki). The sea is very rocky and tectonically active. _Krakatoa_ refers to the 1883 Krakatoa volcanic eruption in Indonesia; ash fell on Singapore over 500 miles away and on ships as far as 3,775 miles away ([x](http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/how-high-can-explosive-eruptions-go-and-how-far-can-debris-and-ash-be-spread)); the sound from the third and largest explosion was heard in Perth, Australia at 1930 miles and as far away as the island of Rodrigues at 3,000 miles (wiki). The tsunamis created from the eruption were also quite devastating, and temperatures globally fell by several degrees. I wonder if events like this if replicated in the Hunter World could affect somewhere as far away as the Dark Continent; I am also curious about characters like Piyon and Kururi and others who study "ancient" history...just what does "ancient" mean to those in the Hunter World? Is it ~500 years ago? A thousand? Or more? I've taken a mash-up approach in looking at how historical elements (many inspired from our own global history) could combine to create the ideal conditions for perhaps one of humanity's first interactions with the Dark Continent. 
> 
> 3) Here, have another one of Kururi's cute faces:
> 
> 4) Thank you for reading! I would appreciate and value your comments.


End file.
